[5] The chief vices of kings denounced by Hindu writers on statecraft are: Hunting, gambling, sleeping in the day, calumny, addiction to women, drinking spirits, dancing, singing, and instrumental music, idle roaming, these proceed from the love of pleasure, others proceed from anger, viz., tale-bearing, violence, insidious injury, envy, detraction, unjust seizure of property, abuse, assault. See Monier Williams s. v. vyasana.
[6] Sudhádhauta may mean “white as plaster,” but more probably here “whitened with plaster” like the houses in the European quarter of the “City of palaces.”
[7] A linga of Śiva in Ujjayiní. Śiva is here compared to an earthly monarch subject to the vyasana of roaming. I take it, the poet means, Ujjayiní is a better place than Kailása.
[8] Cp. the way in which Kandar goes in search of a sword in Prym and Socin’s Syrische Märchen, p. 205.
[9] Dr. Brockhaus translates it—Stürzte den Wagen des Königs um. Can Syandana mean horses, like magni currus Achilli? If so, áhatya would mean, having killed.
[10] Rasa means nectar, and indeed any liquid, and also emotion, passion. The pun is of course most intentional in the original.
[11] Cp. the story of Ohimé in the “Sicilianische Märchen” collected by Laura von Gonzenbach where Maruzza asks Ohimé how it would be possible to kill him. So in Indian Fairy Tales, collected by Miss Stokes, Hiralál Básá persuades Sonahrí Rání to ask his father where he kept his soul. Some interesting remarks on this subject will be found in the notes to this tale (Indian Fairy Tales, p. 260.) See also No. I, in Campbell’s Tales of the Western Highlands, and Dr. Reinhold Köhler’s remarks in Orient and Occident, Vol. II, p. 100. Cp. also Ralston’s Russian Folk-Tales, pp. 80, 81 and 136. Cp. also Veckenstedt’s Wendische Sagen, p. 72. In the Gehörnte Siegfried (Simrock’s Deutsche Volksbücher, Vol. III, pp. 368 and 416), the hero is made invulnerable everywhere but between the shoulders, by being smeared with the melted fat of a dragon. Cp. also the story of Achilles. For the transformation of Chaṇḍamahásena into a boar see Bartsch’s Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Meklenburg, Vol. II, pp. 144, 145, and Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, Vol. II, p. 14. See also Schöppner’s Geschichte der Bayerischen Lande, Vol. I, p. 258.
Chapter XII.
In the meanwhile the ambassador, sent by the king of Vatsa in answer to Chaṇḍamahásena’s embassy, went and told that monarch his master’s reply. Chaṇḍamahásena for his part, on hearing it, began to reflect—“It is certain that that proud king of Vatsa will not come here. And I cannot send my daughter to his court, such conduct would be unbecoming; so I must capture him by some stratagem and bring him here as a prisoner.” Having thus reflected and deliberated with his ministers, the king had made a large artificial elephant like his own, and, after filling it with concealed warriors, he placed it in the Vindhya forest. There the scouts kept in his pay by the king of Vatsa, who was passionately fond of the sport of elephant-catching, discerned it from a distance;[1] and they came with speed and informed the king of Vatsa in these words: “O king, we have seen a single elephant roaming in the Vindhya forest, such that nowhere else in this wide world is his equal to be found, filling the sky with his stature, like a moving peak of the Vindhya range.”